In the United States as in France, we are seeing politics settling into two main blocs: a technocratic-progressive bloc with its roots in the Left and allied with the commanding heights of business, and a reactionary-populist bloc that has swallowed up most of the Right while attracting enough support from the center and the Left (those Sanders-to-Trump voters are a real thing, though the rank-and-file union vote shifting rightward is a bigger deal) to leave the Left proper as a weak third-place contender in a political contest that recognizes only first and second place.

Figures such as Elizabeth Warren are seeking to straddle the technocratic and left-wing camps in the belief that this is the surest route to power against a thoroughly Trumpist Republican Party, but Sanders-style socialism remains a distinctly minority taste among critical voting blocs within the Democratic Party, which is why Joe Biden won the 2020 nomination and is president today. Of course, personalities will shape coming events: Le Pen has lost enough presidential races that she probably will be obliged to pass the baton, and I doubt that Trump will run again on the Republican side, though I do not regard that as an impossibility. As it stands, both camps are limited mainly by their respective cultural radicalisms: There are moderate conservatives who could find some common ground with pro-market technocrats but find it impossible to share political space with people who can’t say what a woman is and support legal abortion up until the moment of delivery. (And, in more cases than you’d think, a ways beyond.) There are moderate Democrats who might be attracted to a political party that wants to protect or even enhance their social-welfare benefits while also taking seriously issues such as crime and illegal immigration but who cannot work themselves around to joining a party that goes to such extraordinary lengths to accommodate anti-vaccine kooks, the Jewish-space-laser element, and (WFB forgive the term!) crypto-Nazis.